Troy Baker, best known as the voice behind it The Last of Us Part IIis Joel Miller, infuriated himself overnight by announcing his support for a new NFT project to monetize artists’ language work. “You can hate. Or you can create. What would you like?” he cautiously tweeted. It didn’t take fans long to make up their minds.
“I’m working with VoiceverseNFT to explore ways we could collectively give new developers new tools to create new things and give everyone the ability to own and invest in the IPs they create,” Baker, who has voiced dozens of video game characters from Final Fantasy XIIIsnow too Fourteen daysis Agent Jones– written overnight. “We all have a story to tell.”
And the internet had a new tweet in relation.
“You still have a choice to either back down now rather than be deeply and genuinely mortified when you think about it a few years from now,” he replied YouTube gaming essayist Jacob Geller.
Baker tried to tone down his tweet a follow-up thread, However, he did not mention whether he actually withdrew from the project. “The ‘hate/create’ part was maybe a bit antagonistic,” he wrote.
So what is this new blockchain-based scheme that Baker is supporting? Voiceverse bills itself as “a 2nd generation NFT built with AI and a highly functional utility that gives you ownership of a unique voice in the Metaverse”. The idea is that an artist creates a recording, someone buys it, and then someone can use it for “in-game chats, Zoom calls, YouTube & Tiktok” and more. Just like before-The partial plan begins with artists adding their voices to the project this month and ends sometime in the future with plans to “collaborate with all your favorite crypto games and communities to make your voice NFTs truly become the voice of the metaverse!” Definitely something worth destroying the environment for.
Why is this different from the existing NFT-as-a-glorified-JPEG scam that everyone has been collectively moaning about for the last year? “Language NFTs offer intrinsic value in addition to an amazing community,” the project claims. “You can’t right-click either of them.” However, these simple explanations raise more questions than they answer. At this point, thanks to the ambiguous phrasing on Voiceverse, it’s extremely unclear how much of a person’s voice you’re getting access to‘s site.
And then there is the question of payment. The original artists receive royalties based on the rising or falling value of their NFT, but it doesn’t go into any further detail. Regardless, I can bet 100 percent that Baker isn’t giving away any of his own meaningful voice work to exploitation and manipulation, however the no doubt soon-to-be-inflamed Voice NFT metaverse sees fit.
A few other celebrities who have spoken out in favor of the odd crypto thug have quickly turned their backs in the face of the backlash. handyman co-star Richard Karn He recently announced that he would be dropping NFTs based on the hit ’90s sitcom and then quickly quit after thinking about it “long and hard”..
Will Baker do the same? It’s difficult to say. The voice of BioShock Infinite‘s Booker DeWitt has a habit Doubling down on stupid stuff. In 2016, he tried to get the Washington Post to do it remove its negative Unknown 4 review by Metacritic. And when former Kotaku editor Jason Schreier tweeted that games should be shorter, Baker responded with a 100-word excerpt from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt about how critics are idiots. Maybe someone can turn now this speech in one of Baker’s Voice NFTs.
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